Legal Instruments for the Protection of Ukraine’s Cultural Heritage: The Mariupol Case

On April 16, 2026, the Raphael Lemkin Society, together with its partners, held an international online conference titled “The Russian Model of Cultural Heritage Destruction During War: The Case of Mariupol.”

Among the speakers was Daryna Pidhorna, a lawyer and analyst at the Society, who spoke about legal tools for protecting Ukraine’s cultural heritage. In her presentation, she emphasized that the ongoing destruction of Ukrainian cultural heritage demands not only careful documentation, but also a strong legal response. The text below is based on her remarks.

In April 2022, the Mariupol Museum of Local Lore lost a significant part of its collection as a result of a Russian attack. What was not physically destroyed was later subjected to another form of harm, this time at the institutional level. The museum resumed operations under the control of the occupation authorities, its staff was replaced, and the institution itself, which for more than a century had helped preserve Ukrainian identity, was turned into a vehicle for promoting the narrative of Mariupol’s supposed “age-old belonging” to the “Russian world.”

The Mariupol Museum of Local Lore is neither an isolated case nor an exception. At the same time, it is especially telling because it illustrates the full range of methods the Russian Federation systematically uses against cultural heritage in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. This is not simply incidental wartime damage. In this context, culture is both a target and a weapon of aggression.

Russia’s Model for Destroying and Appropriating Museum Heritage

If we look at the situation through the lens of the museum sector, a clear pattern of Russian conduct emerges.

1. Physical Destruction or Damage

This may result from combat operations, as in the case of the Mariupol Museum of Local Lore, the Hryhorii Skovoroda Museum, and many other sites, or from deliberate neglect and destructive “restoration” carried out under the control of occupation authorities. A telling example of the latter is the so-called reconstruction of the Khan’s Palace in Bakhchysarai, the consequences of which differ little from destruction.

2. Appropriation of Cultural Heritage

As soon as Russia establishes control over a territory, it begins incorporating cultural heritage sites into its own registries, both at the level of occupation administrations and at the level of federal authorities.

Russia first refined this model after the occupation of Crimea, and in the fall of 2022 it entrenched it directly in four federal constitutional laws purporting to admit the occupied parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions into the Russian Federation. In those acts, Russia explicitly placed the cultural heritage sites located there within the categories of Russia’s heritage-protection system, including the category of sites of federal significance. In other words, this was not only about seizing territory but also about the legal appropriation of Ukrainian heritage. The occupying state was laying the pseudo-legal groundwork that would allow it to portray that heritage as supposedly “its own.”

That same mechanism enables the removal and transfer of cultural valuables under the guise of “evacuation,” “restoration,” or “preservation.” Similar practices have already been documented in relation to the collections of the Arkhyp Kuindzhi Art Museum, the Oleksii Shovkunenko Kherson Art Museum, and many others. In Mariupol, occupation authorities publicly aired a segment about the so-called “unique evacuation” of museum items that in fact documented the looting of three of the city’s museums and the transfer of part of their collections to occupied Donetsk.

3. Replacing Professional Staff and Imposing Institutional Control

Russia seeks to draw local cultural workers into voluntary collaboration, but when that fails, it resorts to pressure, persecution, and coercion to force cooperation. 

An additional instrument was the “Zemsky Culture Worker” program, launched in 2025, which was aimed at systematically staffing cultural institutions in the occupied territories with personnel loyal to Russia.

4. Using Museums as Platforms for Propaganda

What remains of museum collections, museum buildings, and newly created exhibitions are methodically used as platforms for promoting narratives about “reunification,” “liberation,” “the glorification of the special military operation,” “the depravity of the Kyiv regime or NATO,” and the supposed historical belonging of Ukrainian territories to Russia. 

For the occupation authorities, the museum is not merely a place for preserving artifacts; it is also a tool for the systematic rewriting of history.

Not Isolated Incidents, but a Systematic Policy of Cultural Destruction

What happened to the Mariupol Museum of Local Lore should be understood not as a series of separate incidents, but as a sequence of interconnected acts: a strike on the building, the destruction of part of the collection, the removal of surviving objects, the dismissal of Ukrainian staff, the relaunch of the institution under occupation control, and the subsequent use of the museum for propaganda purposes.

It is precisely this recurring pattern, which can also be observed in other cities and regions, that makes it possible to speak not only of individual war crimes, but of a broader policy of cultural destruction. In Raphael Lemkin’s conceptual framework, this can be understood as part of a process in which the destruction of culture, memory, institutions, and symbols is a component of destroying the conditions necessary for a national group to exist.

In that sense, the Mariupol museum is one element in the evidentiary picture showing that Russia is not acting chaotically, but systematically. It destroys material carriers of memory, removes artifacts, eliminates Ukrainian professionals, replaces the interpretation of the past, and in doing so reprograms the cultural space of the occupied territories.

How International Law Classifies These Acts: From War Crimes to Persecution on Cultural Grounds

Museums and other cultural sites enjoy special protection under international humanitarian law. The 1954 Hague Convention prohibits hostile acts directed against cultural property, its use for military purposes, as well as its seizure, pillage, and appropriation. The 1999 Second Protocol to that Convention provides for individual criminal responsibility for such acts.

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court also explicitly provides for responsibility for intentional attacks against cultural institutions, provided they are not being used for military purposes. A strike on a museum, the removal of its collections, the use of its premises for propaganda exhibitions—each of these acts has distinct legal significance. But what is especially important is that together they form a documented pattern of conduct, and the existence of such a pattern opens the door to speaking not only of war crimes, but also of crimes against humanity, including persecution on cultural grounds.

The issue of genocide also deserves separate attention. Under current international law, “cultural genocide” remains a contested category. Yet the logic at the core of Raphael Lemkin’s thinking was that the destruction of a group begins with the destruction of the conditions for its cultural self-reproduction—its language, institutions, memory, and symbols. Mariupol alone is not sufficient proof of the specific intent required for a finding of genocide. But Mariupol, taken together with other documented cases in Kherson, Melitopol, Berdiansk, and other occupied territories, forms the systematic picture without which such a qualification is impossible.

The Victims Are Not Only Institutions, but Also People, Communities, and Cultural Memory

In cases involving crimes against cultural heritage, it is important to move beyond a narrow understanding of harm as the loss of objects or buildings. 

The museum itself is a victim as an institution. Harm was also suffered by museum workers who were forced to leave, lost the ability to continue in their profession, and were cut off from maintaining institutional continuity. The people of Mariupol likewise suffered harm, as they lost access to part of their culture, an inseparable part of their identity. Behind all of this lies a broader loss to Ukrainian cultural heritage that cannot simply be replaced or restored to its original form.

This broader approach matters not only for the moral evaluation of these events, but also for shaping future claims for reparations. The issue is not only compensation for the value of destroyed or stolen objects, but also reparation for the harm inflicted on people, communities, and their right to participate in cultural life.

Documentation for Court, Memory, and Recovery

Documenting crimes against cultural heritage serves at least three different purposes, and each requires its own methodology and tools.

• Human rights and criminal justice: submitting materials to national and international investigative bodies, prosecutors’ offices, and courts.
• Memorial: preserving the memory of the occupation period, destruction, and loss.
• Recovery-oriented: building an understanding of the communities, institutions, and narratives Ukraine will need to work with after de-occupation.

Blurring these purposes without distinguishing the methods weakens the result. Parallel work that is methodologically clear, by contrast, makes it possible to preserve memory, build a sound evidentiary base, and prepare for future recovery at the same time.

Structural Limits of Documentation

Today, documentation remains one of the most important tools for protecting cultural heritage in wartime. However, it also has serious structural limitations that must be acknowledged directly.

1. Lack of Physical Access and Security Risks

Mariupol and many other affected sites remain under occupation. Independent investigators, international observers, and Ukrainian institutions often have no physical access to them, which frequently makes systematic and comprehensive documentation impossible in the classical sense.

A separate problem is the security risks associated with field documentation: the danger to the lives and health of documenters often outweighs the potential value of the data collected, forcing a choice between people’s safety and the completeness of the evidentiary record.

As a result, priority is given to remote documentation through open-source information, satellite imagery, testimony from evacuated persons, and materials received through secure digital channels from people who remain on the ground. But even here, there are many security-related constraints that limit both the quantity and the quality of the data that can be obtained. In addition, remote-monitoring data requires proper verification, which is often difficult, since much of it comes from Russian resources and forums that are themselves frequently unreliable.

2. Fragmentation and the Absence of Common Standards

Different actors—state bodies, international and civil society organizations, research institutions, and volunteer initiatives—work in parallel, often without coordinating with one another. Each uses its own methodology, classification system, and data-storage format, making the resulting materials effectively incompatible.

The result is not only duplication of effort and the dispersal of resources, but also an inability to build a single, consolidated, legally usable database. The absence of shared documentation standards, especially for identifying objects, describing damage, and maintaining the chain of custody, significantly limits the use of collected information both nationally and in international judicial and restitution processes.

3. Gaps in the Evidentiary Record and Verification Challenges

Incomplete, duplicated, or poor-quality data seriously undermines its evidentiary value. Gaps arise for many reasons: lack of access to sites, hurried or unprofessional documentation, and the absence of a clear chain of custody. Without proper verification—independent source confirmation, cross-checking of data, and compliance with procedural standards—collected information loses its legal force.

This means that even large volumes of data may prove unusable in judicial or quasi-judicial proceedings, including cases before international institutions, where evidentiary standards are especially high.

4. No Clear Answer to the Question: “Why Are We Documenting?”

Without a clear understanding of the ultimate purpose of documentation, the process risks becoming a chaotic accumulation of information: technically large-scale, but strategically barren. Existing practice often focuses primarily on recording destruction through photographs, videos, and coordinates of damaged sites. That is necessary, but not sufficient. Such an approach works well for proving the fact of destruction itself, but it is much less effective when it comes to future claims for restitution or compensation.

Different purposes require fundamentally different approaches. Documentation for criminal justice requires strict compliance with procedural standards and chain-of-custody rules. Restitution requires detailed records of provenance and ownership rights. Historical memory requires broad context and testimony. Public policy requires aggregated data and systemic analysis. When these approaches are conflated, or when the issue is ignored from the outset, the result is that the data collected does not fully serve any of these purposes and ultimately proves unusable at the very moment it is needed most.

In this context, creating an electronic catalog of the lost Mariupol museum collection has not only memorial value but also direct legal significance. It provides a foundation for future restitution claims.

5. Destruction of Digital and Physical Evidence in Occupied Territories

The deliberate and systematic erasure of traces, both material and digital, is part of a broader conscious strategy by the occupation authorities aimed at making it impossible to reconstruct events and avoiding responsibility.

The destruction of archives, the burning of books, the transfer of valuables, the alteration of digital records, the deletion of data and news from the internet, manipulation of property registries, and similar acts have a deeply serious cumulative effect: they create irreversible gaps in the evidentiary record that cannot be filled after the fact. That is why documentation during the active phase of the conflict is critically important, despite all the risks, because any delay can lead to the irreversible loss of evidence.

Restitution and Reparations: What Can Be Returned, and Through Which Mechanisms

For unlawfully removed objects, a legal basis for restitution exists and is relatively well developed. The 1970 UNESCO Convention and the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention form an international legal framework for the return of unlawfully displaced cultural property. Article 75 of the Rome Statute gives the International Criminal Court the authority to include the return of property in reparations orders. UN General Assembly resolution 60/147 establishes the obligation of the aggressor state to provide full reparation for the harm caused.

In practice, this means working simultaneously along several tracks:

• Criminal: through investigations, the identification of objects, and their inclusion in future reparations decisions;
• Administrative and customs: through international information-sharing, cooperation with customs authorities, and stolen-art databases;
• Diplomatic and sanctions-based: through incorporating cultural property into broader mechanisms of international pressure on the aggressor state.

In this context, the digital catalog of the Mariupol museum is not a secondary supporting tool, but a key element of future legal work. It records the collection’s prewar condition, helps identify specific objects, and lays the groundwork for concrete restitution and reparations claims.

As for destroyed sites, their restoration must be considered within a broader reparations framework, not only as a form of material compensation, but also as the restoration of the conditions necessary for affected communities to exercise their cultural rights.

The Mariupol Museum of Local Lore is a concrete place, a concrete collection, concrete crimes, and a concrete chain of responsibility. At the same time, it is also a concentrated example of how Russia uses attacks on culture as part of a broader policy aimed at destroying Ukrainian identity.

The museum team did what was possible under extraordinary circumstances: they documented what was lost, preserved memory, and created a foundation for future return and recovery. The task of legal, research, and international mechanisms is to turn that record into accountability, restitution, and reparations.

Protecting cultural heritage in wartime is not a peripheral issue. It is a matter of law, memory, dignity, and security.

And, ultimately, a matter of preserving the nation itself.